Green Homes

Recent Features

Don’t all major home renovations span decades?
Jim Newman and Sarah Slaughter bought a rather pedestrian Cambridge home in 1996 and began full renovation in 2001, recently completing the metamorphosis in 2010. They have always taken the long view on both the environment and their own home’s performance. As building professionals in their own right, Jim and Sarah worked closely with NPS Studios and their contractor on the energy and resource efficiency aspects during BOTH phases of their whole-house renovation.

Anders Lewendal likes to lead — he is president of his local homebuilder’s association and chairs its green building committee, sits on the Mayor’s Climate Control Task Force, and has had entries in the Bozeman Parade of Homes for seven of the last ten years. So when he decided to remodel a 100-year old period home in Bozeman, Montana, it had to be a gut rehab shooting for an Energy Star label. This is no mean feat — there are only a handful of these projects in the entire Northwest.

When Dan Cote bought this run-down property on Woodstock Avenue in Portland, he wanted to take everything he had learned about high-performance building and building science from his day job as a technician and consultant for Conservation Services Group and pack it into the structure and the lot. He pretty much lived in the middle of his work for the next several years.

There are 120 million homes in America, and we need to figure out how to retrofit them for the new reality that we live in. We cannot all choose to move to the country and build a net-zero home and let someone else deal with the existing houses.